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Loading... Red Bird: Poemsby Mary Oliver
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This latest volume of Mary Oliver’s poetry, published in 2008, contains many pieces in which she uses her clarity of vision to help us see what she sees and feel what she feels about it, which I consider is a hallmark of her work of the last ten or so years, the poetry of hers with which I’m familiar. In addition to giving us glimpses and insights into nature, I have many times felt I discerned “life lessons” very subtly hinted at although perhaps sometimes this is something I bring to the poem rather than anything Mary Oliver intended. However, in this volume, the “life lessons” in these poems seem to be more overt as if she is now using these observations to help her cope with life as in other volumes she has been helping me cope with mine. She also deals with a wider range of topics in these selections than I have noticed before in her books, including poems that verge on the political and others that are more religious than she has been in the past. In the earlier volumes I have read, especially in Why I Wake Early, she has given me the feeling that she goes to nature for gaining strength and peace in her life and also for her spirituality. In Red Bird, especially, and less intensely in What Do We Know, I feel that in some way life has overwhelmed her and she is struggling to regain that peace from nature she used to have but she is also looking to God now as a source of either strength or comfort and is also being forced to confront what is happening in the world—no longer able to separate it from her poetry. One possible cause of this change that she acknowledges is she is getting older—reaching seventy and feeling that her time is getting shorter. I suspect from some of the poems in this volume that she is also dealing with a tremendous loss—probably of a loved one either through death or separation. This is a powerful book and more personal than the previous work of hers that I’ve read, even than What Do We Know, published in 2002 in which she gives us some personal glimpses of grief over the death of a beloved dog and also some looking beyond nature for spirituality. (  ) MusicMom41 | Oct 13, 2008 |  The subjects of the Oliver poems are of a naturalistic bent. The collection itself is bracketed by the motif of the red bird which flits throughout the works as a beacon. The poems themselves are rather dark--speaking of night and winter. Even when the setting is spring or summer, it's in the early morning when the darkness is still clinging with tenterhooks. It's the inexorable river images of passing time, the mentions of civilization's disastrous byproducts in the more political pieces, and the dark edges of self-contemplation in the cycle "Eleven Versions of the Same Poem" that emphasizes life as depressing and unpleasant. The only thing that saves life from being truly depressing and unpleasant is the "red bird". Sometimes, this symbol doesn't appear as a red bird at all. It could be aspects of the red bird--like flute players, roses, the coming dawn, the tongue of a panther, apples, berries--which are all vibrant and energetic and as indicated in the collection's final poem, "Red Bird Explains Himself," the soul. (more) syaffolee | May 10, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)
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